As an academic, I am driven by the following commitments: liberatory knowledge, sharing power, and critical application. These values inform my teaching and relationship building with students. In the spring of 2023, as a PhD student, I was approached with the opportunity to teach sociological theory at a private Catholic university. I was both excited and terrified about the prospect. Throughout my academic journey, I have been intentional in selecting academic communities and spaces that value an emancipatory sociology. Therefore, I was a bit nervous, and had been warned by the department chair, about the possibility of pushback from students if I chose to teach “charged” theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory and intersectionality. Despite the warning that my pedagogical approaches might be “too radical” in the more conservative-leaning institution context, this classroom became a place of engaged and energized learning. I believe this was primarily the result of setting classroom norms of thoughtful disagreement and by creating opportunities for reflection and application. The students who I thought might push back against these charged theoretical topics, instead ravenously leaned in and engaged with them. 

On the first day of class, I conducted a poll with students asking them what they hoped to get out of the class. The overwhelming response from students was that they felt that theory was intimidating and complicated, so they hoped the class would help them understand theory in a more accessible and relevant way. While I had a syllabus crafted at this point, in honoring my commitment to sharing power, the students and I reviewed their feedback, concerns, and hopes for the class and made some changes. Through this first conversation with the students, we collectively set the tone for the semester, something that I believe set us up for success. 

One of the most pivotal conversations in this early discussion was on the purpose and presence of disagreement, both between social theorists and between the theorists and students’ lived experiences. In keeping with my values and commitments as a scholar, I included theorists who challenge systems of power, such as Frantz Fanon, David Roediger, Judith Butler, and more. I also chose several clusters of theorists who directly conflicted with one another. For instance, we spent several weeks discussing early racial theories in the U.S., comparing the Chicago School with the Atlanta School of Sociology and comparing Booker T. Washington with W.E.B. DuBois’ belief on racial progress of Black Americans. Through intentionally choosing theorists that were in conflict with one another, I was able to set the norm at the beginning of class that there would be disagreement. By setting and discussing this norm, I emphasized how conflict and disagreement has shaped the development of sociological theory. Once set and agreed upon, I wrote the following into our class policies:      

“This class covers topics which will challenge your thinking and ask you to critically examine society in new and different ways. You may find certain topics difficult given your unique intersectional identities and lived experiences. You certainly will not agree with all of the authors nor perspectives we cover in the class. My expectation is that you see the sociological perspective as a tool. It is an analytic and a framework that you are expected to understand and apply to various social problems.” 

In setting the expectation of disagreement throughout the course, I believe, students came in with an open mind, willing to challenge and be challenged. This disposition toward learning the sociological tools and engaging in thoughtful dialogue, allowed for immensely engaging, interesting, and passionate in-class discussions. Many students, energized by these discussions, shared that this space made them think differently about their own lives and the world around them. For example, one group, in engaging with Fanon, argued that gentrification is a form of colonialism, pointing to examples of it happening in the neighborhood around the university. 

Further, I wanted to pay the utmost attention to making theory learning public sociology. To me, theory is meant to help us solve social problems, and therefore the learning of theory should never be done in a classroom vacuum. In this course, I continually asked students to make connections between the theories and social reality. For example, in their final projects, students had to analyze two theorists/theories and apply their contributions to a social problem. In doing so, they also had to posit what these theorists might say are the merits and challenges to a potential solution. One student applied Horkheimer & Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to social media influencers, discussing that due to the lack of regulation and transparency around paid ad content, consumers’ needs and spending habits are manipulated. Another student in applying Patricia Hill Collins and Judith Butler looked at racialized gender bias in the legal profession and examined how a policy of universal pre-K might reduce discrimination for women of color. Through formal assignments and regular in-class discussion, I persistently emphasized theory’s role as both emancipatory and public.    

In this course, wanting to challenge the students to think differently and critically about their own privilege and the social world around them, I used much of the safety and privilege of my own identities to push students out of their comfort zones. For example, in multiple weeks of discussing race and decolonial theory, I challenged white students to examine the multitude of privileges associated with whiteness and recognize the current ways their own lives maintain racial capitalism and neocolonialism in the U.S. As a white sociologist, I believe it is my responsibility to challenge all students, but especially white students to think in this way. Given the surprisingly positive and engaged response of students in this more conservative institutional context, I wonder how often their worldviews have been challenged like they were in this class. 

Despite coming in with some fear and reservation regarding the student population and their reception to my teaching style and content, I was, simply put, blown away. The students engaged thoughtfully with the content, contributed very real and honest reflections of their own positionality, and applied their learning to social issues that mattered to them. In an end of course survey, I asked students to tell me one takeaway from this course. One student wrote, “this was my favorite class… I liked how comfortable the class felt to speak their mind. The classroom environment felt very welcoming and like there was no judgment. So, I felt challenged and learned so much and also, I feel like I can take what I learned and actually do something with it.” Thus, despite directly engaging with ideas which were politically charged and conflictual in nature, by approaching the class with an established norm of openness to engage in sociological inquiry through the conflict, students reported walking away with learning that was challenging and actionable.

Tess Starman (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Howard University. Her research specializes on intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power at the nexus of religion and politics. She studies progressive Christian attitudes, religious exiting, and religion’s impact on political attitudes and engagement. Her dissertation, entitled, “A Corrupted Faith: The Role of Power in the Process of Christian Disaffiliation and Rise of the Religious Nones,” examines the religious exiting process and non-religious identity formation of ex-Christians. She serves as the Research Assistant for Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion. Tess is the co-chair of the American Sociological Association’s Student Advisory Board and serves on the Pedagogy Committee of Sociological Forum.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are rapidly transforming the current educational landscape, with students far outrunning faculty in their use of these tools. Current research highlights a cultural lag in higher education, a phenomenon Sociologist William F. Ogburn described in 1922. This term refers to the gap in adaptation between material (physical artifacts) and nonmaterial culture (ideas, values, etc.). Cultural lag has historically been observed during periods of technological change, like with the current shift toward AI technology. Students are embracing AI’s potential while many instructors remain hesitant due to their own biases and concerns about academic integrity (Coffey, 2023). We argue that it is incumbent upon sociology instructors to experiment with, observe, and document the use of AI in the classroom, as we are in a discipline founded on understanding cultural and societal change. Moreover, as social scientists, we are well-suited to address and experiment with AI use and adoption in our pedagogical practices. 

In our classrooms, we have begun developing assignments for upper-division Sociology students that implement the use of AI technology. For instance, students in a Social Theory class were tasked with requesting a ChatGPT summary of a prominent sociologist’s theories. After completing assigned readings and participating in a class discussion on the topic, the students identified and corrected inaccuracies, omissions, and superficial interpretations within the ChatGPT summary.  Students in a Medical Sociology class used ChatGPT to create an initial research outline on the “social determinants of health and their impact on healthcare access.” The students then revised and refined the outline. Afterward, the class wrote a brief reflection about the changes they made to the original outline and why. They were asked to explain what additional information they added or omitted, how they adjusted the original structure, and what the exercise taught them about the value of human judgment in using AI technology for academic work- particularly when engaging with sociological topics! 

These assignments were followed by class discussions where students reflected on the process of working with AI technology. Many students reported that these assignments helped them identify limitations and potential pitfalls in overreliance on AI technology. They agreed that AI is useful for brainstorming but not as a replacement for good writing. They noted that ChatGPT tends to be repetitive, obtuse, and includes extraneous superficial information while omitting important details. In some instances, AI included information that students could not verify.

Overall, students found ChatGPT to be useful in organizing information but lacking in the critical analysis that comes from human insight. Students expressed more confidence in the value of their own writing skills and the expertise they developed to discern important and truthful information. They also expressed appreciation for the novelty of these assignments.  For almost all students, this was the first time they were assigned to use AI in an academic classroom. Many explained they had previously viewed AI tools like ChatGPT as shortcuts that “lazy students” might rely on to avoid putting any thought or effort into their own work. 

Moving forward, we believe it is crucial for sociology instructors to embrace and integrate AI thoughtfully and intentionally into our teaching methods. AI is reshaping many areas of society including industries, media, and education. As a result, developing ethical and responsible ways to work with it has become as essential as any other professional skill. Additionally, experimenting with AI as a teaching tool can be fun and enjoyable for instructors. It provides an opportunity for creativity, helps us remain relevant, and enables us to bridge the cultural lag in higher education.

Read more: Most students outrunning faculty in AI use, study finds (insidehighered.com)

JoAnna Boudreaux is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis. She also serves as the coordinator of the internship program. Her pedagogical approach is centered on creating a collaborative learning environment and exploring innovative teaching methods, including the integration of AI tools. She teaches courses such as Marriage and Family, Gender and Society, Medical Sociology, and Racial and Ethnic Minorities. 

Kendra Murphy is an Associate Professor of Teaching Coordinator and Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis.  Professor Murphy’s teaching is focused on helping students develop critical thinking and writing skills that they can use throughout their lives. She is best known for her creative lectures on social deviance and teaches a variety of classes including Introduction to Sociology, Methods of Social Research, Sociology of Poverty, and Sociological Theory.  Whether by discussing statistics or bringing furries into the classroom, Professor Murphy is committed to helping all of her students in developing their sociological imaginations.

Lessons from the pandemic: when students feel supported and connected, learning happens. See Senter’s Teaching Sociology article for convincing evidence.

See this Teaching TSP post on podcasting as an alternative to in-class lectures!

Sociological theory often feels disconnected from nearly everything else we teach in undergraduate courses. This is not totally an accident, but it is unfortunate. Why? Because sociological theory is the backbone of the discipline, and of the sociological imagination you hear so much about. As a scholar who studies adolescent suicide and youth suicide clusters in high schools, theory has been indispensable to all phases of the research process, especially translating findings into easily readable and actionable deliverables. Before I say a bit more about how we might rethink teaching theory,it’s worth reflecting on why sociological theory should be taught differently.

I would start with a simple qualifying statement. A lot of classical theory may not feel connected to the reader’s lived reality because, well, it doesn’t. When I was an undergrad and then a grad student and now a professor teaching that course, I struggled and still struggle with making some of it relevant. In some cases, it is very macro, or the theory covers a large amount of time and geographic space. Marx’s theories, for instance, are broad-stroke theories of human societies that stretch back quite far, but our brains are designed to make sense of time spans that fit lived experiences more readily. Often, what is theory and what is philosophy, ideology, or pseudoscience is not distinguishable because classical theory emerged without peer-reviewed publishing standards. This makes wading through dense texts challenging and, admittedly, boring.

That said, when my professors extracted the basic theoretical ideas and helped explain them with contemporary examples, I saw what theory could do. Theory provides us with the language for situating the self, or in C. Wright Mills’ terms, our biography within the historical, political, economic, and cultural context that enables and constrains how we feel, think, and act every day. It pushes us to not take for granted that what we know or how we interpret an event or issue or person’s behavior is “right.” Like all sciences, a good theory course should teach us that the more we learn, the less we actually know. It should motivate us to want to understand more, and to develop better tools for studying the things that interest us to create better explanations; explanations that can be used to shape policies, influence political or economic actors, or simply improve discussions we have with strangers, friends, and family.

We should cultivate more empathy because of theory. Indeed, the most public form of public sociology is simply acting towards others around us in ways that recognize the systemic sources of difference, the need for sympathy and empathy, and the effort to not create more conflict but find ways to help others recognize these differences are normal, healthy, and do not have to stymie civility and kindness.

So, what would a more practical, fresh approach to teaching classical sociological theory look like? I offer two related possibilities.

1. The biggest dilemma, in my opinion, with classical theory stems from the vagueness surrounding the term “classical.” In the most literal sense, we are talking about the earliest sociological thinkers compared to contemporary theorists. But, what makes someone contemporary? Should they be alive? Should they have been publishing in my lifetime? My students’ lifetime? What should we do with the thinkers theorizing from 1930-1970? Should we simply abandon them because they do not fit the heuristic?
   
   An alternative way to think of classical theory is the emergence of certain enduring kernels of sociological inquiry. For instance, Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life can be taught many different ways, but its most enduring insight is that emotions are the cement with which relationships, groups, and communities form and are sustained. The mechanism is repeated, stereotyped gatherings that, in turn, draw participants’ attention and emotional arousal to a central focus—an activity, a conversation, or a social object (e.g., bands or political speakers). Because this feeling is felt to be outside of our body and mind, we ascribe the source to a “third-party”: the group. Every time we gather, we feel the group.
   
   It would be easy to draw a few pages here and there from this text that highlight the imagery Durkheim employs, but couple it with more accessible, theoretically developed, and empirically grounded texts. Goffman’s Interaction Rituals, Collins’ Interaction Ritual Chains, and Lawler’s Affect Theory of Social Exchange all are indebted to this insight and all show the evolution of theoretical ideas from rough, informal premises to solid propositions. Simmel’s relational work can be brought into conversation with network theory; Weber’s work on authority and power with the myriad theories of power today; the notion of status groups found in Veblen and Weber paired with reference group theory, status expectations state theory, small groups research, and so on.
   
   In my experience, students enjoy this far more than being mired in Marx’s German Ideology or the linguistic twists and turns of Durkheim’s Division of Labor. They lose nothing, as they are still confronted by some of the original material. The distracting misogyny and ethnocentrism one would expect from 19^th century white, male writers are tossed in the trash bin for good, while central animating ideas are recovered. It has further consequences, for students, of (a) connecting 200-year-old ideas with contemporary sociological research and (b) embedding theory, as a subfield and cornerstone of a discipline, into the rest of the courses they will take for the major. That Durkheim or Weber or Du Bois’ ideas remain salient to people doing actual research and extending theories in legible ways makes the discipline feel fresh, forward-thinking, and growing rather than stale, mired in the past, and hermetically sealed.

2. Leaning into contemporary readings has a sort of meta-effect on course design: it forces the instructor to think hard about what ideas endure and which are artifacts of the antiquated milieus in which they were written. For instance, Durkheim’s thesis in the Elementary Forms has found strong empirical support in sociology, anthropology, the ethnographic record, cognitive science, and neuroscience. This signals “sociological principle.” That Durkheim hedged on his thesis in the Division of Labor and, eventually, disputed it in the final section of the book suggests shaky ground for inclusion in a course.
   
   Imagine, for a second, that a course was built up from basic problems or questions that are partially answered through principles that continue to inform how we think, study, and write about them. Durkheim’s central problem was integration, or how do diverse groups or communities form and sustain a sense of we-ness? This question is no less important today than in 1897 or 1532 or at the rise of the earliest states some 5,000 years ago. Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—among others, also felt that the problem of regulation was essential to understanding social organization and change.  Communities face pressures to coordinate and control members, especially as they get larger, denser, and more heterogeneous. How do they do this, what are the consequences, and how do solutions often lead to change? The strength of this approach is that these questions work at most scales. I can explain integration and regulation by talking about the growth of a family. Two people fall in love and get married. What happens when they have a child? A second child? A third child? A parent comes to live with them? What are the challenges they face with growth in “population” and diversity? Where do the necessary resources come from? Who decides who gets what and how much? These are fundamental sociological questions that classical theorists and contemporary theorists continue to ask and answer, even if they often focus on “societies” or “organizations” and not the immediate social worlds we all are familiar with.

Dr. Seth Abrutyn is a Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Abrutyn specializes in youth suicide and is also a general sociologist whose research rests at the intersection of mental health, emotions, social psychology, and culture, and which has won several national awards. His overarching goals as a social scientist are to merge sociological theory with the public imagination in hopes of making accessible sociological tools in the service of solving social problems.

Having seen how many students are unaware of how to register to vote, the mechanics of voting, and why voting matters, coupled with my own naturalization as a U.S. citizen, has compelled me to make voter engagement and registration an integral part in my classes and spearhead a college-wide effort in the same realm.

There is so much potential in incorporating voter education in college classes. In addition to demonstrating to students that what they are learning in class is related to real world issues, it gives students the opportunity to practice skills they acquire in their classes. This is what employers (and grad schools) are looking for (see for example, National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Career Readiness). 

Here, I will discuss one in-class lecture and activity that bridges the study of intersectionality and voting education that I conceptualized for a Sociology of Gender class. This, along with additional assignments and activities, was developed while I was an inaugural fellow of the Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars Program funded by the Mellon Foundation. 

There are many ways to introduce and explain the concept of intersectionality to students. To do so, I assign a variety of readings including, but not limited to, an article by Jan Ellen Lewis that discusses that certain women had the right to vote in New Jersey for a short time period after the American Revolution. This and other academic references are used as a launching pad for students to comprehend why universal statements such as “when women got the right to vote” (referring to the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920) are not only inaccurate but fail to consider that different women have had different experiences. I provide various examples to students: Single and propertied women in New Jersey during a particular time period could vote, but lost the right to do so. The majority of Black people, regardless of gender, were prevented from voting until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Similarly, until U.S. citizenship was imposed on Native Americans through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, they were also disenfranchised, often until 1957, since voting rights were governed by state laws. I use these examples of exclusion to explain to students what intersectionality is and why intersectionality must be part of social science and humanities research as well as policy analysis. At times, at the end of the lecture, I have asked students to create social media posts directed to a fictitious high school class in which they explain in their own words what intersectionality is and problematize why it is not helpful to speak of the “experiences of women” without applying an intersectional lens.   

In addition, I assist students to register to vote, check their voter registration status, and/or request a mail-in ballot (Centers for Civic Engagement, the League of Women Voters, or other local organizations  are usually able to assist with this.) Importantly, I also have resources available for students who are citizens of other countries. For example, Stony Brook University’s Center for Civic Justice has a country-by-country guide.

There are a number of resources and grants that aim to assist faculty interested in incorporating voter education into their classes. Among them are the aforementioned peer-reviewed Civic Engagement and Voting Rights Teacher Scholars assignments and syllabi, Periclean Voting Modules, Faculty Network for Student Voting Rights, The Center for Artistic Activism, AASCU’s Resources on Voting Education and Engagement, and Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice.

Bernadette Ludwig is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Civic Engagement at Wagner College. Professor Ludwig’s research focuses on how racism affects African refugees in their ability to find refuge and in the resettlement process. Her other work investigates how community engagement can nurture students’ sense of social justice and belonging.

See Odum and Kordsmeier’s discussion about the impact teaching sociology in “unprecedented times” can have on students. While various difficulties may arise while teaching during crises, this article gives teachers ideas to craft their pedagogy for an engaged future.

For tenure track faculty with research intensive roles, balancing research and teaching can be difficult. Meanwhile, students are eager to obtain transferable skills to enhance their career prospects at the same time as community and government organizations benefit from research projects that provide useful data for their work. With these realities in mind, I set out to incorporate a community-engaged research project into my undergraduate Environmental Sociology course at Utah State University. 

I knew I wanted the project to focus on water conservation (a salient topic in Utah), particularly on the state’s rollout of the Landscape Conversion Incentive Program (LCIP)—a program that incentivizes the replacement of residential lawns with more water-efficient landscaping. To prepare for the course, I coordinated with two community partners to refine the project’s research objectives and develop interview instruments that would generate useful data for each agency: the Utah Division of Water Resources (the agency that rolled out LCIP) and the City of North Logan (the municipality closest to our campus that is eligible for the program). In addition to building this collaboration, I applied to have the course designated as community-engaged learning (CEL)  and submitted an IRB protocol with each student listed as a research assistant. 

Once the course began, students obtained their CITI certification as required by IRB. Early in the course, they read empirical and theoretical works highlighting water conservation, landscape conversion, and the cultural significance of lawns in the United States. They also learned about interview-based data collection to prepare them for the task at hand. In the meantime, I was hard at work with participant recruitment, a task I didn’t want to burden the students with. I distributed flyers at key public locations across North Logan, and set up a participant recruitment booth at North Logan City Library. Participants were offered $20 gift cards for participating in our study.  It took a couple of weeks to get participants enrolled in the project, but once we had willing participants trickling in, I paired each student with an interviewee. Students reached out to participants to schedule their interviews, carried out and audio-recorded the semi-structured interview, and then transcribed and proofed the transcriptions in Otter.ai (a transcription software). 

All proofread and de-identified transcripts were then brought into Dedoose, a cloud-based software for qualitative coding. We then held a three-day “Coding Jamboree,” in which students worked together to code all of the interviews for emerging themes, patterns and outliers. Students then individually used the coded dataset to write up individual papers connecting their findings to the literature read earlier in the term. Finally, the whole class collaborated to produce a presentation of preliminary research findings that they presented over Zoom to our collaborating agencies. 

By the end of the semester, students were CITI certified and had experience with 1) carrying out a semi-structured interview, 2) transcribing and editing, 3) coding qualitative data, 4) writing a qualitative research paper, and 5) presenting findings to state and local agencies. Meanwhile, with the assistance of my students, I collected data that I will use in subsequent reports and publications. Finally, our partnering agencies received data that will help them refine their water conservation and LCIP rollout efforts. This is why I like to think of community-engaged learning as a triple win: a win for students, for faculty, and for the community.

Kirsten Vinyeta is an assistant professor and environmental sociologist at Utah State University. Her research employs qualitative methods to study the socio-political dimensions of land and fire management, federal-tribal relations, climate vulnerability and resilience, and multispecies dimensions of human social systems. She teaches courses on environmental sociology, the sociology of climate change, multispecies justice, and social science methods. 

Looking to summarize to students recent discussions on eviction and gentrification? Hepburn, Louis & Desmond (2024) look at six million court cases filed in 72 cities in the US and find that eviction is a durable component of neighborhood disadvantage.

When I first started teaching, in the Fall of 2022, I was surprised by how often things that seemed obvious to me eluded the grasp of my students. This wasn’t about course material: that, I expected to have to teach them. But I was surprised by how often students didn’t seem to know things that are basic to higher education: How should you read a research article? What counts as plagiarism? When should you ask for help? 

Once I learned about the hidden curriculum, or “the set of tacit norms, policies, and expectations in an educational context that insiders expect all students to follow but are often not taught explicitly”, this lack of knowledge made sense. Students dealing with the hidden curriculum at the college level are often dealing with it alone: they may not have family to ask about norms, or may feel embarrassed about not knowing what to do. This hidden curriculum is important because we often use its standards to judge students, and it is unfair to judge students based on expectations they were not aware of.

In order to help students become aware of the expectations and standards on which they may be judged, I’ve started using the first week of class to introduce students to the idea of the hidden curriculum, explicitly addressing its specific norms, policies, and assumptions. I start by telling students the story of how I learned to read,  not  as a child, but how I learned to read again when I first entered college. I tell them how I was first taught to read linearly when I was young: to start with the first sentence of the picture book and end with the last one, reading every single word in a row. But when I entered college, I realized that this way of reading was not always so helpful. In college we’re often reading something for a particular purpose and, depending on that purpose, we should change our reading strategies. I explain to students that learning to read differently was difficult for me and that it was made even more difficult by never being explicitly told that my linear reading strategy wouldn’t always work. With that story, I explain to students that we’re going to spend some time discussing some parts of the hidden curriculum. I let students know that, while some of this information might not be new to them, it will be new to others, and I want all my students to start off on equal footing in my classroom.

Then, I get into the aspects of the hidden curriculum that I think are especially important to success in sociology classrooms. I discuss what a journal article is and how to read them, how to communicate effectively with professors through email, the difference between “doctors” and “professors”, what plagiarism is, and the plagiarism review process, to name just a few. This past semester, I also explicitly talked about ChatGPT and AI. In addition to these topics, I also introduce students to various offices and resources around campus that could be useful for students going through a difficult time. While perhaps not technically under the umbrella of the hidden curriculum, I think that ensuring that students are aware of where to seek help strengthens my main goal, which is to ensure that all of my students have the knowledge they need to thrive in college. 

Students appreciate going over the hidden curriculum. Even though I go over this the first week of school, students often come up to me after class enthusiastic about this new knowledge. One example from this past semester is that a student who was going through a bit of a financial dilemma told me that they were not aware of the offices on campus that might help them, and told me they were going to get in contact to hopefully help with their problem.

Discussing the hidden curriculum does not, of course, mitigate the effects of the social inequalities that make its discussion important in the first place. Students come into the classroom with different levels of cultural capital, and this exercise does not and could not make everything equal between all students. However, I think that it is an important first step in helping students who don’t already have this particular knowledge by giving them new tools to succeed in my class and throughout the rest of their time in college. It is an easy way to demonstrate to students that you care about creating a more equitable classroom and sets you up for continuing that atmosphere for the rest of the semester.

Kylie M. Smith is a sixth-year doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia. She has taught several courses for the sociology department including Introductory Sociology, Sociology of Gender, and Social Psychology. Her research interests include gender, social psychology, and inequality.